The Very Best Men is the story of the CIA's early days as told through the careers of four glamorous, daring, and idealistic men who ran covert operations for the government from the end of World War II to Vietnam. Evan Thomas re-creates the personal dramas and sometimes tragic lives of Frank Wisner, Richard Bissell, Tracy Barnes, and Desmond FitzGerald, who risked everything to contain the Soviet threat. Within the inner circles of Washington, they were regarded as the best and the brightest. They planned and acted to keep the country out of war -- by stealth and "political action" and to do by cunning and sleight of hand what great armies could not, must not be allowed to do. In the end, they were too idealistic and too honorable, and were unsuited for the dark, duplicitous life of spying. Their hubris and naïveté led them astray, producing both sensational coups and spectacular blunders like the Bay of Pigs and the failed assassination attempts on foreign leaders in the early 1960s. Thomas draws on the CIA's own secret histories, to which he has had exclusive access, as well as extensive interviews, to bring to life a crucial piece of American history. from the publisher's website (timspalding)… (more)

"Megan Marshall's brilliant Margaret Fuller brings us as close as we are ever likely to get to this astonishing creature. She rushes out at us from her nineteenth century, always several steps ahead, inspiring, heartbreaking, magnificent." Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity

"Megan Marshall gives new meaning to close reading—from words on a page she conjures a fantastically rich inner life, a meld of body, mind, and soul. Drawing on the letters and diaries of Margaret Fuller and her circle, she has brought us a brave, visionary, sensual, tough-minded intellectual, a ‘first woman’ who was unique yet stood for all women. A masterful achievement by a great American writer and scholar.” Evan Thomas, author of Ike’s Bluff: President Eisenhower’s Secret Battle to Save the World

Megan Marshall is the author of The Peabody sisters, which won the Francis Parkman Prize, the Mark Lynton History Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography and memoir. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Atlantic, and Slate. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEH fellowships, Marshall teaches narrative nonfiction and the art of archival research in the MFA program at Emerson College.

Evan Thomas discusses The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898.

On February 15, 1898, the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor. Though there was no evidence the Spanish government was responsible, newspapers, including William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, excited the American public with claims that Spain's “secret infernal machine” had destroyed the battleship. Soon after, the United States declared war and sent troops to Cuba as well as the Spanish colony in the Philippines. In The War Lovers, Evan Thomas reveals a hunger for war that had begun years earlier. Embracing theories of social Darwinism, a group of warmongers that included the young Teddy Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge agitated that the United States exert its influence across the seas. This is he story of six men at the center of a transforming event in U.S. history: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, President William McKinley, psychologist William James, and Speaker of the House Thomas Reed, and confirms Evan Thomas as a popular historian of the first rank. (jasbro)… (more)